


Fool's Day

by orphan_account



Category: Captain Underpants Series - Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)
Genre: April Fools' Day, Birthday, I...I did this with the intention of it being a drabble and got too attatched, so... here's to my favorite crotchety jerk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 03:53:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14179983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A general overview of how Benjamin Krupp spends his birthday in comparison to how things used to be.





	Fool's Day

      Krupp affords himself few luxuries, but the one thing that he does do, just the one, on his birthday, is allow himself to be late for work.

      Just a little late. Fifteen minutes.

      To be fair, his late was everyone elses ‘on time,’ so it wasn’t that ostentatious of an allowance at all. In fact, to many, it slips just under the radar.

      This gives him a second gift. Truth be, he considers it a bit of a bogo.

      Coming in late means he doesn’t have to talk to anybody.

      The mindless, panicked babbling that would swamp his office can’t happen if he isn’t in his office, and when he’s timed his entrance perfectly right- just after everyone had their coffee but just before the start of class- he can give himself an entire morning of pristine quiet.

      This is important for two reasons.

      1: George and Harold do their April Fools pranks around lunchtime, when they have the largest possible audience. Krupp needs all the quiet he can get before that storm breaks.

      2: The amount of quiet a crotchety old bastard like Krupp needs in order to survive is absolutely astounding, though it is much like trying to keep alive a water lily affixed to a boulder in the middle of Death Valley.  

      Which is hilarious, considering. Benny used to use his birthday boy privileges to raise all sorts of trouble. He’d wear his party hat to school and speak only in pig latin or rhymes. He'd sing loud sings and dance like a chicken, or walk on top of the monkey bars and act out overdramatized scenes from his mother's soap operas. 

      One year- and sometimes, he’ll remember this when the dissection frogs show up- he broke into the school, took all their guts, and replaced them with gummy worms, though not before dumping the frog guts onto the table in the teacher’s lounge.

      One year- and sometimes, he’ll think of this when he sees one of the other coworker’s birthday cakes- he took frosting to a balloon pretending he had baked his own cake, only to pop it once his friends had stopped singing Happy Birthday.

      But Krupp doesn’t do that now. Krupp just lets himself be fifteen minutes late so he doesn’t have to talk to anyone.

      Or, rather, there’s one thing that could be considered a trick if Krupp wasn’t such a party pooper, and that is he doesn’t pay for the faculty room doughnuts on that day.

      It’s not so much a luxury as it is just a little- just one- just a tiny thing he willfully forgets to do. Again, it’s such a small thing that nobody picks up on it. His secretary doesn’t even notice when his normally crumpled single dollar bills fail to appear as she counts up the money before placing the order for delivery.

      Correction: two.

      There are two things.

      Because once he sees the delivery truck pulling up the drop off loop, at the same time every year give or take five minutes, he tells Anthrope not to worry about going down to pick them up- he’ll get it- it’s fine.

      And if one so happens to not make it back to the break room, well, Krupp tells himself, wiping the filling of a Boston Creme from his mouth with a thumb before licking away the evidence, well, isn’t that just a mystery.  

      The thing is, no Boston Creme can never match up to Benny’s mother’s. He’s not sure what set it apart; maybe it was the heavy kosher creme filling, or how she’d get the chocolate from their trip to the boardwalk and keep it frozen all year. It’s not like this was exceptionally special, she did it for everyone’s birthday, but the fact remains that eating a slice of that was like, as his Catholic friends had put it, receiving manna from heaven. Maybe that was why his father always stole a slice before anyone else could get a chance- he didn’t want to miss his shot. It had always been a bit of a game, him pretending to not notice the tight wedge, measuring at best half an inch, that had spontaneously vanished from the cake. He had always assured his whining children that he’d make sure no other small, vandalous trickster would touch the cake, though he’d give his vow with a small smiling hiding under the bristles of his mustache, his breath smelling like sugar.

      Nobody ever asked Krupp about the missing doughnuts, but if they ever did, he had a story prepared about two young hooligans tripping him up in the hallway and running off with the one- just the one. Funny they didn’t take two.

       After school is out, and after he’s put the extra hour in trying to clean up whatever mess George and Harold made, he drives to the cinema. Sometimes, he’ll read the paper to find out what’s playing, but most times, Krupp just shows up, looks blindly at the titles, and picks. Rarely are the films ever good, but it doesn’t matter much. He’s usually done his popcorn before the advertisements are over and is asleep before the end of the first act anyway. It’s just a different kind of background noise as he rests in a different comfy chair, and if he gets dirty looks at the end because he was snoring, so what? It’s not like he’ll see these people again.   

       There are some times where he does know the film though, or recognize a name. Not the actors, he couldn’t care less, but if he so much as reads the words ‘superhero’ and ‘new movie’ in the same sentence, he makes sure to pencil the title down on his calendar so that he doesn’t forget.

       He still loves heroes, that hasn’t changed, though it presents itself in quieter ways now. Once, Benny used to run around the house screaming wearing nothing but his underwear and the cape his mother made him, while his brother trailed behind with the clear plastic salad bowl on his head. Before his father had hurt his back, they would cling to his legs as he stomped around the house. He had this fantastic trick of being able to gargle milk and make it look like he was foaming at the mouth, and though his mother would roll her eyes and tell them to cut it out, they’d be allowed to get away with the mess only because it was someone’s birthday, and that made a little bit of the chaos alright, right? It made the heroic fight all the better, and with their father flat on his back, the two boys sitting on his chest, it made the victory all the sweeter.

       Krupp’s house is quiet. There is no screaming, and there is no gargling of milk- he doesn’t even blow bubbles with a straw- but at the end of the day, when all the daylight hours have been spent, Ben sits in his chair with a dusty comic, flipping idly through the pages until he reaches the end, at which point he sits back and allows himself to rest, to remember, and smile quietly to himself in the silence.

 


End file.
